Film as an anti-asylum technique: international law, borders and the gendering of refugee subjectivities

ABSTRACT In 2015, the Australian government commissioned a telemovie as part of its strategic communication campaign to deter would-be asylum seekers from travelling to Australia unauthorised by boat. In this article we explore this film as one instance of state practices that seek to control migration at their borders, and a form of state messaging which uses gendered story-telling techniques and characterisations to do so. Officially termed ‘public information campaigns’ (PICs) by states or ‘information strategies’ by international organisations such as the UNHCR, the use of such practices has increased in volume, frequency and prominence in recent years. While there has been some academic attention to PICs, to date, the gendered dimensions of these campaigns have remained largely unexamined. In this article, we argue that a feminist analysis of PICs is critical to understanding both how state borders ‘gender’ refugee subjectivities as well as international law’s authorisation of the violence of state borders more generally. By allocating blame and responsibility on individual refugees and their gendered choices, rather than on state actions and state violence, the film reveals how the institution and policing of state borders simultaneously rest upon gendered imaginaries of refugee responsibilisation and the invisibilisation of state responsibility.